What Does Resistance Mean in the Era of Trumpism?
PART THREE - The POLITICAL STRATEGY of Resistance: What We Must Do Together to Crush the Fascist Beast of Trumpism
Part 3: The Political Strategy of Resistance – What We Must Do Together to Crush the Fascist Beast of Trumpism
“Let justice prevail, even though all the rascals in the world should perish as a result.” (Kant, quoted in Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future, 224)
“In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.” (Walter Benjamin)
“To become sober is: to come so close to oneself in one’s understanding, one’s knowing, that all one’s understanding becomes ACTION.” (Kierkegaard, Judge For Yourselves!, 130)
“And if you fail to act, hiding from yourself and from others behind a screen of deliberation, you bring down the responsibility solely upon yourself as an individual… Purity of heart is to will one thing.” (Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 189)
Our Nation’s Existential Crisis
When faced with the existential challenge of the dissolution of our Republic by a fascist threat, there can be no hesitation about the need for immediate action, together with others, to actively RISE and join the FIGHT to defeat that threat. The growing evil of non-thinking “knaves and fools,” who are attempting to take over our politics and destroy our democratic experiment in freedom – our legacy of struggle to create a more perfect union – cannot be tolerated if we wish to “keep” this Republic.
For if WE don’t learn to stand up for our democratic freedoms through engaging an effective and courageous strategy of resistance to this fascist movement, and act to preserve the institutions of our free Republic, then those who are acting politically to destroy our democratic republic will win. No one will step in from outside to save us from our own inaction in the face of the ultimate banality of evil that Trumpism is! In fact, our nation’s enemies, like Putin’s Russia, are actively working from the outside to strengthen the power of that banality of evil to destroy the United States from within, without ever having to fire a shot. Trumpism is the ultimate Trojan horse of U.S. democracy.
We fall silent in dumbfounded perplexity in response to the sheer unprecedented absurdity of the politics of Trumpism’s Big Lie – because we find it so hard to take seriously, to give it credence, to understand its power, to believe it has the power to define reality for so many millions of our fellow Americans – even as we watch in stunned amazement as it mobilizes tens of millions on its behalf, and see millions of our fellow citizens consent and bow down to its absurdities, turning over their money to its cause, and sacrificing their wills and votes in devotion to it. How do we confront and counter the confounding force of the banality of evil represented by Trumpism, as embodied in the sycophantic action of the GOP & the speech & actions of 1/6/21 and its aftermath?
As this essay has argued, the core barriers to engaging an effective Resistance are the lack of clear concentration on the nature of the political movement we are fighting against, our failures to confront and overcome the cowardice and banality of evil in ourselves, and the lack of a clear political vision and strategy for defeating the fascist totalitarian movement of Trumpism. Fascism feeds on the weakness and sources of corruption in all of us. And just as a bully will continue to grow in strength until someone stands up firmly against him to swat the bully down, so a fascist movement will continue to grow until a united political force stands up to the bully and says, with the organized power of a nation united to back these words up by ACTION, “NO MORE!”
The fascist threat that Trumpism represents will not go away until enough of us take on the responsibility of our democratic powers as citizens to take ACTION in solidarity with others to STAND UP to the bully movement of Trumpism to say to both the movement and its petty fuhrers through our organized political action, “NO MORE!” We will do this by standing up and acting together against the automatism of the non-thinking crowd of sycophants working to destroy the foundations of our constitutional democracy and the institutions of our common political community.
So the central question of this last part of our essay is this:
HOW do we accomplish the strategic goal of mobilizing, in short order, a united political movement capable of rising to the challenge of stopping and crushing this fascist bully movement of Trumpism, which is now working to seize the reigns of government power so it can turn these powers against “we the people” and destroy our democratic republic?
We now need a clear strategic vision for how we will work together within the next six months and throughout 2022 to summon both the courage and the will to 1) RAISE UP a true resistance movement of democratic solidarity to fight FOR the treasures of our democratic citizenship and 2) CRUSH the ongoing insurgency of the fascist beast in our midst!
The totalitarian beast of Trumpism is feeding on the weakness and sources of corruption and disunity in all of us! Therefore, if we want to crush it, we must take both individual and collective responsibility for addressing these common sources of our weakness, so we can raise out of the ashes of our common failures the organized democratic power needed to counter the core source of fascism’s corrupting force: its ability to prey and feed on our collective weakness and divisions against each other. Once we have developed effective political mechanisms for countering that core mechanism of corruption, we will have gained the power to cut the beast off from its food sources (of money and propaganda), and THAT is our common strategic goal: to starve the beastly body of Trumpism into a weakness that allows us to attack and crush its head, its political source, so it can no longer continue to lay waste to our institutions of political community and common humanity.
Since this beast draws its power from consuming and degrading the institutional sources of our political community, the minute we join together in an effective resistance movement to defend these institutional sources and strengthen their bulwarks against the continuing depredations of this beast, from that moment we will begin cut the beast off from its food sources and begin starving it into defeat. None of us can do this alone. We need to act in solidarity with each other as the common political party of democratic humanity standing against the beast that seeks to destroy everything we value together as the foundation of our common, but fragile, human world. And unless we act together now to starve and crush this beast, we will all watch helplessly together as this beast destroys our common democratic world, as it did in Europe during the 1930s.
This time the fascist beast is raising its fiendish head here in the United States. So it is up to us, the people of these United States, to cut off the beast’s head to ensure the 2020s in the United States do not follow the path of Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis were allowed by Germany’s leaders and citizens to seize power in 1933 and quickly convert the German democratic state into a fascist one-party dictatorship lead by Hitler.
Toward a Political Strategy of Resistance built on the Treasures of Our Democratic Citizenship
Part One of this essay analyzed WHAT we are fighting against, to provide a clear sense of the specific elements of the fascist totalitarian movement we are committed to resisting. As summarized in Part One:
1) Trumpism is the abdication of Thinking, the surrender of thinking to a politics of lies dictated by the Fuhrer and his Trumpist cult, and dedicated to the overthrow of truth itself.
2) Based on the overthrow of truth and all institutions of truth-telling, Trumpism abdicates all responsibility for ethical judgment and action, and thereby seeks to overthrow all personal responsibility for our shared human community, and for the preservation of human life itself.
3) Trumpism is the abdication of constitutional democratic politics in pursuit of a totalitarian will to power —> Trumpism is therefore a fascist totalitarian movement dedicated to the overthrow of our constitutional Republic.
THIS is what we are fighting. There can be no effective resistance to Trumpism that does not completely comprehend and grapple with THIS reality. And, there can be no effective political movement to counter Trumpism that does not develop a clear strategy to defeat it based on both an understanding of what we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for.
To mount an effective resistance movement, as this entire essay has emphasized, it is therefore not enough to know only what we are fighting against. As Part Two emphasized, we must also clearly understand and take responsibility for what it is we’re fighting for: the treasures of our democratic citizenship. It’s an understanding of this spiritual “home territory” we’re defending that creates the foundation for the most impassioned and effective resistance. For if Trumpism is the abdication of human responsibility for ethical judgment and action, and works to overthrow all personal ethical responsibility for our shared human community and the preservation of human life, we must powerfully and clearly RECLAIM that responsibility and fight for it, as the foundation of our resistance movement. Together we reclaim our responsibility for this fight by developing an effective strategy and uniting around that strategy to crush the fascist beast in our midst.
So let us turn now to a full and direct focus on the third component of understanding what true resistance means: the political strategy of resistance built on the foundation of the treasures of democracy and the inspired soul of democratic citizenship. For here is the ground on which we stand to prosecute our fight against the fascist beast. And unless we all come together in a common understanding and organized strategy for renewing not just the political spirit of democracy, but also its political agency and power, through the dedicated work of citizenship that is required to rebuild and strengthen the soul of our democratic INSTITUTIONS, we will be trying to fight the fascist enemy with our hands tied behind our backs while standing in quicksand.
Failure to achieve a clear understanding of our common mission and strategy to defend and strengthen our core institutions of democratic truth-telling is our political quicksand. And if we don’t build a clear bridge over that quicksand, we will allow the fascist movement to take possession of, and destroy our democratic treasures. At that moment our institutions collapse and our great democratic experiment collapses with them. And that collapse will constitute the ignominious end of the story of America’s great “experiment” in democracy brought about by the MAGA nonthinking of the Trumpist mob.
So what are the core components of an effective political strategy of resistance to crush the fascist beast of Trumpism?:
1) Establish the Foundation: Develop a new democratic political movement to defend and strengthen our core institutions of democratic citizenship: education, the news media, and our system of justice (courts, judicial appointments, systems of judicial nomination and election).
2) Take the Offensive against the core elements of fascist movement-building (its processes of development), including its central propaganda outlets and funding sources, which feed the fascist beast – “The best defense is an aggressive offense”: Attack and cut off the primary sources of fuel sustaining and growing the Trumpist movement: it’s corrupt funding sources & propaganda outlets.
3) Defend Democracy – Work the strategy to:
a) STOP and counter the work of the fascist beast to overthrow the electoral institutions that guarantee fair elections by doing all that is necessary to nonviolently protest the U.S. Senate’s Inaction UNTIL they PASS strong Voting Rights legislation that will reverse the ongoing efforts of the fascist GOP to rig the 2022 and 2024 elections to facilitate their seizure of power.
b) STOP the fascist brownshirt tactics of violent threat, intimidation, and action by demanding that our justice systems aggressively pursue, arrest, and hold the perpetrators of these violent tactics accountable for their crimes.
These three components of an effective resistance strategy are intimately interconnected since the development of each one depends on the work of the other components. There can be no effective work to counter any of the core components of fascist movement without a strong movement of democratic citizenship (component 1) that provides the positive foundation for the work to starve and crush the fascist beast (components 2 and 3). And there can be no effective work to counter the GOP efforts of voter suppression (component 3) unless components 1 and 2 are developing apace.
1. Establishing the Foundation: Taking “Responsibility” for Our Democracy
To establish the proper foundation for our resistance, we must develop a new democratic political movement to defend and strengthen our core institutions of democratic citizenship: education, the news media, and our system of justice (courts, judicial appointments, systems of judicial nomination and election).
As Part Two exposed, the degrading processes of Fascism are able to take over our institutions of political power, one after the other, only so long as we, as individuals, surrender the sources of power we have through our own connections to democratic institutions and our fellow citizens, our common bonds of citizenship. This surrender occurs as we allow our common political bonds to be weakened and dissolved through corrupting attractions to the lowest common denominators of lust, greed, hatred/resentment, and will to power. And it is the primary goal of fascist propaganda efforts to broadcast and empower these seductive attractions, as FOX NEWS has so clearly demonstrated.
As Part Two of this essay also elaborated, in circumstances where “political life has become petrified and political action [has become] impotent to interrupt [these] automatic processes [of decay]… freedom is not experienced as a mode of being with its own kind of ‘virtue’ and ‘virtuosity,’ but as a supreme gift” of the isolated few/elite (Arendt, BPF, 167). And so no wonder the masses turn against such an elitist “freedom” of the few in a resentment that further fuels the fires of fascist populism. In such a context, these automatic processes of political decay “can only spell ruin to human life… The historical sciences [therefore] know only too well such cases of petrified and hopelessly declining civilizations where doom seems foreordained, like a biological necessity” (Arendt).
But, as Arendt also observes, “what usually remains intact [even] in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source of production of all great and beautiful things. But so long as this source remains hidden” from public view, and alienated from the public participation of the people in the kind of public happiness of solidarity our political founders experienced, freedom remains unpolitical like an unworldly disembodied ghost isolated from the reality of politics. The re-worlding of freedom comes through a rebirth of public engagement with, and struggles to strengthen, our core democratic institutions of education, public media/the press, and our institutions of justice.
As we saw in Part Two, it is in the moment when freedom steps forth decisively and courageously into the public realm, and takes its place of responsibility as part of a united cause freely accessible to all who want to participate in public action, that the miracle occurs: the appearance of the inevitable necessity or doom of events is shattered by the advent of a new beginning of political action. This new beginning of political action stands up to, and goes to battle with, the violent automatism of historical inevitability, to call its bluff! And this bluff is called precisely when an aroused citizenry takes up the work of defending and strengthening our institutions of truth-telling to secure them from degrading depredation and overthrow by the politics of lies. This is when public freedom is born anew, and public happiness or solidarity is rediscovered through the action of a new politics of struggle to renew the institutions of truth-telling that forge the bonds of citizenship in the present with the tradition of past struggles to free all from slavery to tyranny, greed, and the will of some to assert unlimited power over others.
The treasures we uncover in that moment of awakening and recommitment to the public freedom of democratic institution-building are the treasures of our true democratic citizenship, which provide the key to the forms of political action in concert with others needed to mount an effective resistance against fascism to prevent it from winning and destroying all we hold dear. These treasures of our democratic citizenship give us the resources needed not only to deconstruct the mechanisms of growth that allow fascist totalitarian movements to develop and seize power. These treasures also give us resources needed to champion a powerful new activism of democratic truth-telling that becomes the pulsing heart of a rebirth of democratic institutions. And it is this rebirth of democratic institutions that provides the most potent vaccine to the political virus of Trumpism that is currently corrupting our core institutions of news, education, and justice to destroy democracy rather than strengthen it.
2. Taking the Offensive: “The best defense is an effective offense”
Since the project of renewing our democratic institutions of truth-telling is intimately intertwined with the project of countering the propaganda of lies that is the tip of the fascist movement’s sword for destroying our institutions, we can’t discuss the work of democratic institution-building without first taking into consideration what is needed to fight and counter the politics of lies that is the foundation of fascism. For the process of renewing our democratic institutions of truth-telling will grow out of our work of taking the offensive against the core elements of fascist movement-building, beginning with the virus-like spread of its destructive propaganda of lies.
Indeed, “taking the offensive” against fascism means taking our fight to the home territory of the fascist movement’s core elements and processes of development. If the best defense of democracy is an effective offense against its enemies, then we must direct our attack toward cutting off the primary sources of fuel sustaining and growing the Trumpist movement: it’s propaganda outlets, and its corrupt funding sources.
Countering the Abdication of Thinking at base of the Politics of the Big Lie: Putting Thinking into Action
Since propaganda efforts to promote the Big Lie are the originating and energizing core of the fascist movement’s efforts to build up an alternate universe of political reality based on the easy manipulability of the Fuhrer’s lies – which can then be used to displace and war against the common world of facts that is the stabilizing foundation of the established democratic political order – the first and primary task of any defense and renewal of democratic institutions is to develop a clear strategy for attacking and undermining the propaganda outlets and networks of the movement.
An effective anti-propaganda strategy will have two main objectives that counter the two primary objectives of the fascist propaganda effort: First, since fascist propaganda and its corrupt apostles are dedicated to converting individuals over to a shared faith in the Big Lie by convincing people to surrender the responsibility of thinking and judging for themselves in order to give their minds and souls over to forms of semi-religious indoctrination detached from independent thinking, our counter-strategy must be precisely and implacably directed at unmasking and revealing to individuals the methods and sources of these fascist indoctrination efforts. Just as fascist propaganda attacks reasoned thinking grounded in evidence and facticity, so our counter-propaganda strategy is grounded in the implacable insistence on developing resources throughout our culture that strengthen our ties to rational fact-based thinking in all aspects of education, the news media, and institutions of justice.
Secondly, since fascist propaganda is dedicated to undermining our attachment to the institutions that sustain our common shared world of facticity by constant militant assaults on our core truth-telling institutions of justice, education, and the news media – to deprive these institutions of their ability to be the bulwark that sustains the established norms of a democratic political order – our strategy of resistance is dedicated to the constant strengthening of popular understanding and attachment to these institutions that are the core of our democratic existence.
Countering the Violent Bully Politics of Domination
Our strategy of resistance also develops methods for countering and attacking the four core elements of fascist propaganda:
1) While fascist propaganda pukes contempt for all established forms of intellectual and organized, rational debate – with the objective of overthrowing truth itself – our resistance strategy constantly defends and promotes the fundamental values of intellectual and reasoned discourse and debate;
2) While fascist propaganda rejects all forms of shared agreement to abide by the standards of reasoned political compromise and debate, since these are the very structures of democracy that allow politics to be governed by the peaceful battle of ideas grounded in shared consent to the rule of truth and facts, our resistance strategy is dedicated to the creative, constant defense and promotion of a shared commitment to the standards of reasoned political debate, based on evidentiary facts and norms of truth-telling, that are the foundation of a nonviolent democratic political order. And our strategy will strongly and clearly establish such agreement to common standards of truth-telling as the necessary foundation for any engagement in political debate. Individuals and parties that make clear their unwillingness to abide by such reasonable standards of engagement will be rejected out of hand as unsuitable partners for political discussion, for the same reasons that we reject negotiations with terrorists. And fascism is, after all, in its rejection of all standards of truth for purposes of reasoned compromise, a form of political terrorism grounded root and branch in violence.
3) While fascist propaganda declares war on all established forms of social and political order as it works to blow up the established norms and institutions grounded in some basic consent to the rule of truth and law, our strategy of resistance champions the rule of truth and law as the basis of all civilized and democratic political order. This does not mean our strategy of resistance is uncritical of existing norms and institutions, but it clearly recognizes that all constructive critique of existing institutions must be grounded in a common commitment to the rule of truth and law.
4) And finally, while fascist propaganda is grounded in a clear willingness to give consent to the violent action that is the culmination of its “any means necessary” strategy for accomplishing its overthrow of the established political order, our strategy of resistance is planted firmly on a commitment to opposing and holding accountable to the rule of law ALL who would use violence and threats of violence as a means to achieving their political objectives. And in the service of this strategy, our resistance movement is devoted to strengthening the laws and resources of the institutions of justice responsible for pursuing and prosecuting the violent extremists in our midst, along with their promoters and facilitators.
Countering the Politics of Division & Disunification
Finally, because the deepest emotional components of the logic of fascist propaganda and its movement are those dedicated to using all existing anxieties over group differences to drive a wedge between groups as the most fundamental tactic of its strategy to divide and conquer a democratic nation (by constantly pitting groups against each other), our strategy of resistance is firmly committed to the hard work of building bridges of mutual understanding and collaboration across lines of difference as the most foundational labor of a strongly diverse, multicultural politics of political resistance. For just as surely as fascist movements recognize their greatest enemy is the diverse force of coalitions united together against the fascist movement, so our strategy of resistance makes the building and strengthening of such diverse coalitions a primary foundation of our fight against the propaganda and political tactics of fascism.
Instead of allowing the fascist movement and its propaganda to exploit differences of race, religion, gender, sexuality, economic class, and political ideology to its recruiting advantage, our resistance strategy recognizes the diversity of perspectives represented within our country as one of the great treasures that nurtures our democracy so long as we work constantly to embrace these differences as cultural treasures rather than evils to be suppressed by a dominant white male minority in pursuit of its own totalitarian power.
Democracy only functions to the extent communication and debate across lines of difference is valued as the strength of a diversity that makes the struggle for mutual understanding worthwhile, because everyone understands that the treasure of achieving mutual understanding enriches ALL. When that common understanding and commitment collapses amidst the cacophony of mutually armed groups at rhetorical war with each other, all politics is reduced to a zero-sum game of struggle for the power to subdue the other, which then normalizes the politics of violence that inevitably results in actual violence. The “Replacement Theory” of white nationalists is just one example of this kind of us vs. them non-thinking. Our resistance strategy rejects all such us vs. them thinking that normalizes processes of dehumanization of the other that can culminate – as history has repeatedly demonstrated in all its horror – in genocidal attempts to exterminate the other. Any individual, and any country that says this cannot happen here has not yet learned the horrible lessons that history has tried to teach us: It can happen here.
What, in summary, is the proper form of political resistance/action to the propaganda of the Big Lie? What, at bottom, do we need to do to counter the politics of the Big Lie? We each need to start thinking – in action – and to demand that others stop to think for themselves instead of following the dictates of political propagandists and corrupt fools. And to anyone who simply throws back the junk they last heard on Fox News or read on their Facebook/Meta feed, our response is: “Stop parroting propaganda and lies, and show us you can think for yourself!” We must begin to demand, strengthen, and insist on the politics of truth-telling in all we do.
Crushing the Fascist Beast by Renewing Our Democratic Institutions of Truth-Telling
Since the project of renewing our democratic institutions of truth-telling is intimately intertwined with the project of countering the propaganda of lies dedicated to destroying these institutions, we needed to first review the elements of an effective strategy for countering the politics of lies that is the foundation of fascism. Based on those strategies, the more specific strategies for renewing our democratic institutions of truth-telling will grow directly out of our work of taking the offensive against the core elements of fascist propaganda and movement building.
The project of democratic institution-building involves the work of renewing not only our core institutions of democracy, such as education, the judiciary, and the media, but also involves the renovation and strengthening of the core institutions of our constitutional government. While this essay is not intended to detail all the dimensions of this institutional work, here are some key examples:
For the renewal and strengthening of our democratic institutions of government, we should be organizing to fight for fundamental legislative reforms that establish clearly required (not optional) institutional guidelines for maintaining ethical integrity while serving in any elected or appointed government office:
1) There should be clear legal standards (not just norms) for the election, appointment, or maintenance of a person in government office starting with, most logically: No person who has advocated or been involved in organizing actions to overthrow the constitutional procedures or government of the United States can be eligible for, or continue to serve in, any federal government office. Any documented evidence of planning or participation in an insurrection to overthrow the constitution or constitutional procedures of the U.S. government should immediately disqualify a person from election to, or continuance in government office, without requiring any vote by Congress.
2) For service in the highest political office in the country, the highest standards expected of a nominee to, or elected holder of the presidential office should be written into law, beginning with the expectation that every nominee for president, in order to be placed on the presidential ballot, must have submitted the last ten years of their returns to public review. The nominee must also undergo an FBI check for prior criminal history. Any prior criminal history must be disclosed to the public, and any felonies will make a candidate ineligible for presidential office. And Congress should overrule the DOJ ruling that places a president above the law by making the president ineligible for felony prosecution while serving in office. Any felony indictment of a President should require immediate suspension from active duty in office, with automatic activation of the 25th Amendment, until such time as the indictment is overturned.
3) To strengthen Congressional authority as a coequal branch of government to fulfill its constitutional oversight duties, the subpoena powers of both the House and the Senate ought to be strengthened to authorize and require Congress to utilize its inherent contempt powers to swiftly arrest and hold in contempt anyone who defies a Congressional subpoena. Also, any Congressional referrals to the DOJ for prosecution should require the DOJ to perform an expedited review and decision process. Finally, any judicial overview of congressionally-ordered subpoenas of people or evidentiary materials should be required to receive immediate and expedited judicial review. This applies especially to any defiance of subpoenas relating to obstruction of Congress or obstruction of justice charges brought by Congress against members of the Executive branch including the President.
For the renewal and strengthening of our democratic media, we should establish clear legal framework that requires any organization that wishes to be classified as a news media organization to follow basic rules of factual evidence and truth-checking in order to hold that title. Media orgs that exhibit a pattern of violating the rules of factual evidence should lose the privilege of being able to call themselves a news organization. And in a democracy all media companies should be held legally accountable for patterns of communication that attack or undermine the constitutional foundations of the nation.
For the renewal and strengthening of our judicial institutions, the processes of judicial appointment should be de-politicized throughout the country, especially at the federal level. To begin, the Senate should outlaw the use of ideologically partisan tests or grading systems, such as those of the Federalist Society, for choosing or reviewing federal judiciary nominees. Any evidence during Senate hearings that a judicial nominee has been selected based on such ideologically partisan standards should immediately nullify the nomination for further consideration by the Senate. Lack of clear legal rules directed at protecting the independence of the judiciary from political partisanship are destroying our judiciary as a truth-telling institution, including the Supreme Court itself, as recent cases concerning abortion and Roe v. Wade are making clear.
3. Defending Democracy: The Political Strategy of an Effective Resistance Movement
As Part One of this essay established, the fascist movement of Trumpism has already entered the stage of seizing governmental power. The abundant evidence for this is clear to anyone paying attention to all the ways the Fascist GOP has been working throughout 2021 to gerrymander electoral districts, change voting laws to suppress the vote of citizens more likely to vote Democratic rather than Republican, and violently intimidate into retirement any local election officials dedicated to defending the integrity of our elections, in order to take control of local electoral boards. These facts make clear that the most urgent part of our political strategy over the next months and year must be directed at halting this undemocratic seizure of power by a fascist GOP.
Our primary strategic goal must therefore be to put an end to the tactics being used by the GOP to seize government power. But then we must also initiate work toward attacking and dismantling the institutional mechanisms of recruitment that are fueling the Trumpist movement’s continuing development. In other words, we must implement a strategy that simultaneously attacks both the processes of movement recruitment and seizure of power. THIS is how we STOP the ongoing totalitarian processes of fascist development. And fortunately the 3-pronged strategy of attack outlined at the head of this part of the essay, which is grounded in the core work of strengthening our institutions of democratic truth-telling, is the strategy that will allow us to accomplish both these objectives.
An effective strategy of resistance capable of crushing the fascist beast of Trumpism will therefore require us to work together to integrate the three elements of this strategy into a structured political movement with the following objectives:
1) Establish the Foundation: Develop a new democratic political movement to defend and strengthen our core institutions of democratic citizenship: education, the news media, and our system of justice (courts, judicial appointments, systems of judicial nomination and election).
2) Take the Offensive against the core elements of fascist movement-building (its processes of development), including its central propaganda outlets and funding sources, which feed the fascist beast – “The best defense is an aggressive offense”: Attack and cut off the propaganda outlets and corrupt funding sources that are the primary sources of fuel sustaining and growing the Trumpist movement.
And finally, in addition to establishing the foundation of an effective resistance movement, and taking the offensive against the primary sources of support for the fascist movement, we must most immediately coordinate work to:
1) STOP the ongoing work of the fascist beast to overthrow the electoral institutions that guarantee fair elections by doing all that is necessary to nonviolently protest the U.S. Senate’s Inaction UNTIL they PASS strong Voting Rights legislation that will reverse the ongoing efforts of the fascist GOP to rig the 2022 and 2024 elections to facilitate their seizure of power.
2) STOP the fascist brownshirt tactics of violent threat, intimidation, and action by demanding that our justice systems aggressively pursue, arrest, and hold the perpetrators of these violent tactics accountable for their crimes.
Conclusion: Our Critical Democratic Mission
As Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker state:
“[General] Milley had often remarked to others that the United States had the only military in the world whose members do not take an oath to a monarch, leader, tribe, religion, or country. They take an oath to the Constitution—a living, dynamic document—and to the idea that American citizens are born free and equal and can rise to the level of their merit, skills, and hard work” (I Alone Can Fix It, 186).
Organized plans of resistance, coordinated by people of integrity, can work to defend democracy from tyrants and bullies. General Milley and Defense Secretary Esper saved our nation from its potential collapse into dictatorship by resisting Trump’s demands to use the military to respond to the BLM protests in June of 2020 and after. If Milley and Esper had not stood up to Trump in that moment to draw a firm line in the sand to underline the U.S. Military’s independence from politics, our democracy might already have collapsed into dictatorship over the last year. This would have been the case if less ethical and constitutionally loyal military leaders had replaced Milley and Esper, and had been standing ready to implement every despotic whim of Trump.
But instead we had men who clearly understood and courageously stood up for our Constitution and its values: As Milley stated in his critical letter to all the military high command on June 2, 2020 – the day immediately after he got sucked into the political scene of Trump’s clearing of Lafayette park for the President’s Bible show: “We all committed our lives to the idea that is America – We will stay true to that oath and the American people” (Peril, 98).
In a private meeting with his staff later in June, Milley further clarified his game plan:
“My obligation to the American people is to make sure that we don’t have an unnecessary war overseas. And that we don’t have the unlawful use of American force on the streets of America. We’re not going to turn our guns on the American people and we’re not going to have a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario overseas” (Peril, 109).
And later with his military chiefs in the Joint Chiefs meeting room at the Pentagon, Milley clearly outlined his phased plan to get the country safely through the transition of power from the election of 2020 through the Inauguration of January 20, 2021 and the first 100 days of the next administration:
“Phase 1 is from now until the election, Nov. 3. Phase 2 is the night of the election through certification. Phase 3 is certification through the inauguration on January 20. And phase 4 is the first hundred days of whoever wins the election. We’re going to take it step by step. We’re going to work our way through this. I’ll be on point. JCS, you guys, I just need you to stand shoulder to shoulder—everybody. And the watchword of the day is steady in the saddle. We’re going to keep our eye on the horizon. And we’re going to do what’s right for the country, no matter what the cost to ourselves” (Peril, 110).
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In the crucible of Trump’s test of the will of his military leaders, Milley defined his fourfold mission as he looked toward the election and Inauguration of Jan. 20, 2021:
“I have four tasks from now until the twentieth of January, and I’m going to accomplish my mission: Mission One is to get us from now until the election without U.S. troops on the streets of America killing Americans. Mission Two is no overseas war with Iran. Mission Three is maintaining the integrity of the U.S. military. Mission Four is maintaining my own personal integrity. That’s my mission and I commit to you that mission. And our mission is to ensure the United States of America has a free and fair election with no U.S. military involvement whatsoever.” (I Alone Can Fix It, 188-189)
IN the crucible of our country’s current ongoing crisis leading into the critical midterm elections of 2022, military leaders like Milley and Esper will no longer be able to protect us from the much deeper threat of constitutional collapse represented by the ongoing GOP seizure of the power of our electoral institutions. Therefore, my fellow citizens, we need our own strategic plan for the mutual defense of our democracy – one that clearly delineates our mutually related missions as citizens of this great but fragile republic, and as human beings, committed to the common defense of our Constitution, our country, and our democracy.
Like General Milley, we should think of defining our mutually coordinated Mission in strategic phases like those Milley defined to get us through the immediate crisis of the 2020 election and the 2021 transition of power. In order to prevent Trump or any traitor like him from ever again stepping into the Oval Office, we have a series of mutually interdependent Missions to accomplish over the next three years:
Most immediately, Phase One of our political mission is to vigorously engage the work of strengthening the strategic focus and work of our resistance movement.
Phase Two of our mission is to do everything we can as citizens to ensure that our duly elected and appointed political leaders accomplish two things quickly: 1) pass an effective and substantive Voting Rights Act ASAP to reverse the primary means by which the corrupt GOP is attempting to jury rig the 2022 and 2024 elections so they can seize the power of our federal government and use it to destroy our democracy, even as they use the appearance of elections to accomplish their overthrow; and 2) hold the leaders and planners of the 1/6/21 insurrection accountable for their betrayal of our Constitutional democracy by bringing them to clear and firm Justice.
Phase Three of our mission is to do everything humanly possible to make sure the entire American public is engaged with the 2022 midterm elections as the most serious election of this country’s history since the days immediately before the Civil War. If we want to preserve our nation, we must all work together to make this the most highly participatory election in American history since nothing less than the future of the country and survival of our democracy are at stake in the 2022 elections. THIS should be the PRIMARY MESSAGE and focus of the 2022 elections: not the minutia of specific policies or candidates, but the existential survival of our democracy, with specific messaging that makes clear how all votes for the GOP are votes for fascism and the destruction of everything our country has come to stand for since the Second World War and the defeat of European fascism.
Phase Four of our mission is to build on the legislation of the Voting Rights Act to strengthen the core institutions of democracy on which the effectiveness of such legislation depends: our local and state institutions that protect school board and election officials from the kinds of ongoing violent threats and harassment that are the stab in the back to any functioning democracy.
And Phase Five of our mission is to uphold and ensure the country is able to have a safe, fair, and peaceful presidential election in 2024 that firmly rejects, and moves beyond, the threat of the violent overthrow of our democracy represented by Trump and Trumpism.
On the basis of the strategic vision developed in this essay, this is only one way of outlining our united mission: the mission of all true U.S. patriots and citizens dedicated to saving our democracy from a collapse into fascism in the three years ahead. I make no pretensions to this being the only proper way of outlining our mission. But as the founders of our nation did when signing the Declaration of Independence, let us all rise to embrace the common struggle for our most fundamental democratic principles and “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
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